BoB (Box of Broadcasts) National Provides 2M TV Programs Online

BoB National is a shared online off-air TV and radio recording service by the British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC) for the UK’s education sector.

With over 3,000 user sessions a day, it provides 2M TV and radio programmes through 60 TV and radio channels for users to choose and record from. Infortrend’s EonStor DS,ID arrays were chosen as the ideal storage platform to sustain the task of content downloads, uploads, capture, edit and review.

Specialised in providing educational, convenient access to television and radio programs post-transmission, BUFVC attached a high importance to BoB’s video/radio platform and storage hosting. They needed to be able to accommodate a high volume of views and downloads; the main storage requirements were high speed file access to deliver the content to end-users, fast write speed or capturing broadcast data, and high scalability for future expansion.

BUFVC adopted the proposal provided by Cambridge Imaging Systems Ltd, who have been developing media archive management systems for over two decades, and Infortrend’s EonStor DS series was deployed as the main storage system for BoB. Infortrend’s RAID systems have a track record and have been deployed by Cambridge Imaging Systems in several high profile projects.

“Infortrend’s robust and reliable storage platform forms the bedrock of this high profile educational resource used for teaching and research across the UK. It was easy to deploy and has been dependable from day one,” said Richard Wassall, technical project manager, Cambridge Imaging Systems. “I think the most important value of Infortrend’s RAID storage solution is that it delivered piece of mind that the storage structure could support hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users at any one time. It enabled off-air content to be automatically repurposed for education without any major administrative overhead.“